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Writer/Creator

2014 - OneChuck Production - Mazda - Scriptwriter and assistant director for "Le Grand Duel Mazda", web and TV spots
2013 - 2014 - Rat Films - Les Génies de l'extrême - Head researcher and scriptwriter for a forthcoming television series bought by Expora (CBC)
2013 - OneChuck Production - Hunt's TV Spots - Scrips
2013 - Toppik - Website
2012 - Cossette - Office du Tourisme Québec - Four-Season Brochure (Adaptation from winter brochure)
2012 - Cossette - Office du Tourisme Québec - Québec Original Lexicon, Fun Facts, Adaptation (Two years later, many of the entries in the "Glossary" and "Did You Know" section are still mine)
2012 - Tuxedo - makeup.com - Short Copy Branding
2012 - Cossette - Office du Tourisme Québec - Cyclo-Tourism Summer 2012
2012 - Cossette - Office du Tourisme Québec - USA Microsite Summer 2012
2012 - Cossette (Québec) - Exceldor - Print Ad in Ricardo Magazine
2012 - Cossette (Québec) - Lunique Condos - Print Ad
2011 - Cossette - Cossette Website

2011 - Cossette - Office du Tourisme Québec - France Microsite Winter 2011

2011 - OneChuck Production - Blue Dragon TV Spots - 2 scripts
2011 - OneChuck Production - GLAD TV Spots - 3 scripts
2011 - OneChuck Production - Vendirect TV Spots - 2 scripts

Translation/Revision

2012 - Cossette - Aeroplan - eStore Promo Titles, Short Copy Adaptation
2012 - Tuxedo - Dermablend, Go Beyond the Cover - Translation and revision of contest forms
2012 - Tuxedo - essie - Brandbook Revision
2012 - The Routledge Companion to Urban Regeneration - Translation and revision of article 51
2012 - Sport in Society: Cultures, Commerce, Media, Politics - Translation and revision
2011 - Cossette - Cossette Website - French and english version

2011 - Archambault.ca - Entire eBook site, FAQs, Terms of Service - English Version

2010 - Sid Lee - Marina Bay Sands website

Content Manager

2012 - Sid Lee - Société des Transports de Montréal - Contest "Faites résonner votre voix dans le métro - Monitoring
2011 - Cossette - Cossette Website
2011 - Archambault.ca & Archambault SIE - Promotions, product description - eBooks, french books
2011 - Archambault.ca & Archambault SIE - Data retrieval, database troubleshoot
2011 - Sid Lee - Pointe-à-Callière, Musée d'archéologie et d'histoire de Montréal - Research, content and wireframe plan the Yours Truly Montreal (Signé Montréal) microsite
2011 - Sid Lee - adidas women 2011 - Copydeck & Video Subtitles
2011 - Sid Lee - adidas basketball 2011 - Copydeck
2010 - Sid Lee - Tourisme Montréal - Cheat On Your City - Copydeck
2010 - Sid Lee - Marina Bay Sands
2010 - Université de Montréal - Department of Comparative Literature

University

Thesis

2014 - By Indirections Find Directions Out: Thinkable Worlds in Abbott and Vonnegut (Forthcoming)

Master's Thesis

2006 - Le paradoxe dans les Alices de Lewis Carroll; La force du littéraire dans la théorisation de l’irrésoluble

Articles

2014 - Post-Scriptum.org - Cette crise indéfinie qui causera l'effondrement de la civilization
2012 - Post-Scriptum.org - Cadran sur pied; penser le temps hors du moment
2011 - Post-Scriptum.org - Définitions ratées et figures foisonnantes; Le geek et la liste
2010 - Revue Trans- - La figure du geek comme stratégie de lecture; Naviguer la “pop culture” à l’ère du surplus culturel
2010 - Post-Scriptum.org - No 12 - En attendant la fin du monde; La structure littéraire de l’apocalypse - Project director, data management, revision, cover creation, etc.
2009 - Lignes de fuite - Geek Is as Geek Does? Cosplay and Geek Chic as Conflicting Sides of a Figure in Need of Definition
2009 - Lignes de fuite - Les malaisés dans la culture, ou, le geek n’est pas canon

2006 - Post-Scriptum.org - Le common sense de la logique, le non-sens de la littérature

2005 - Konstellations - Le sujet du destin

Conferences

2013 - True Geek: Defining Identity through Personal Narratives of Transcendental Experience - Presentation at the 44th international congress of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) taking place in Boston, Massachusetts

2012 - Epistemologically Possessed: The Daemon as Junction between Conceptual Character and Thought Experiment - Presentation at the 26th Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA) taking place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

2011 - Séléno-logique; l'impossible voyage dans la lune - Conference - Part of the Atopos Cycle of Conferences at the University of Montreal

2011 - Out with the Old Recycling, In with the New Repurposing; Accelerated Sampling as the Language of Urgency - Presentation at the international conference Aesthetics of Renewal hosted by the Canadian Association of American Studies (CAAS) at the Chateau Laurier, Ottawa

2011 - Unburdening the world of Atlas; Mapping Knowledge through Imagined Impossibility - Presentation at the international conference World Without a Center: The Dispersal of Knowledge and Culture in the Planetary Age, taking place at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University

2011 - Le trouble-fête littéraire de la thermodynamique; Le demon de Maxwell comme figure génératrice – Presentation at the 9th international Word & Image symposium taking place at the UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal)

2011 - The Ecstasy of “Impossible” Knowledge; Conveyed Transcendence in Hinton’s New Era of Thought - Presentation at the 42nd convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) taking place at Rutgers University, New Jersey

2011 - L’amitié est-elle le dernier bastion de la sincérité contemporaine? - Presentation at the international symposium Penser l’amitié at Concordia University

2010 - Ne jurer que par un livre: la sacralisation du texte profane, la profanation du texte sacré -Symposium organiser, taking place during the 78th annual ACFAS conference at the University of Montréal

2010 - La spéculation mimétique contre la possibilité du sacré; Interprétations de la memorabilia dans A Canticle for Leibowitz - Presented at the symposium “Ne jurer que par un livre: la sacralisation du texte profane, la profanation du texte sacré” during the 78th annual ACFAS conference at the University of Montréal

2010 - L’attrait du vide; Le voyage temporel comme mouvement figuratif de l’éternité 0 Presented at the international symposium “L’envoûtement. Principes du processus figural” at the Concordia University

2010 - The Causality of Thought Experiments; Impossible Divinations and Possible Worlds - Presented at the international symposium “Explosive Past, Radiant Future” at the University of Toronto

2009 - Le Jeu du savoir; Entre expérience de pensée et créneau spécialisé - Presented at the interdisciplinary symposium “The Artfulness of Play; Bridging Creative and Theoretical Discourse” at the University of Western Ontario

2009 - Le Démon littéraire du scientifique; La fiction comme remise en question de la vérité - Presented at the 77th annual ACFAS conference at the University of Ottawa

2009 - Les malaisés dans la culture, ou, le geek n’est pas canon - Presented at the international symposium “Malaise; La fissure dans la littérature et les autres arts” at the University of Montréal

2009 - Se figurer l’éternité : Limites épistémologiques (et parfois apocalyptiques) de la réflexion sur l’infini temporel - Presented at the international conference “L’Apocalypse perpétuelle: l’effondrement du savoir et autres cataclysmes”

2008 - Repenser le futur de l’éducation - Representative for the comparative literature department in a panel on the future of education with the University of Montreal’s Dean of the Arts

2007 - La contextomie : La communication a-t-elle cause à déterrer l’auteur littéraire? - Presented at the 75th annual ACFAS conference at the UQTR (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivière)

Other

2013 - 2014 - L'Asie devant soi - Blogue de voyage, conjointement avec Sophie-Annick Vallée
2012 - 2014 - Grandeur de l'empire - Co-curator of a museum exhibit (as well as creator of shown multimedia installations) - Carrefour des Arts et des Sciences
2007 - 2014 - Post-scriptum.org - Editor in Chief and Webmaster
2010 - 2013 - Translator for Catherine Mavrikakis, author and professor
2008 - 2009 - Grant for the organization of the multidisciplinary performance night Prozaïc two years in a row
2008 - Presentation of youth poems at the festival Voix d'Ici during the On ne peut pas tous être Émile Nelligan night
2005 - 2007 - Member of the CISM Board of Directors
2005 - Subtitles for documentaries such as 92 cents per litre, presented at the Festival des Films du Monde.
2002 - 2003 - Journalist for Le Délit, McGill's Only French Newspaper - Music & Show Critic

The Death of Flash

Well, it's in. Windows' next browser will not offer plug-in support. While Internet Explorer will remain plug-in-friendly, this change in browser priorities from Microsoft, to what they call a Metro-style browser, is one more signal towards a new web ecology that most of us could see coming from miles away. When Steve Jobs famously announced that the iPad would not support flash, it became clear that touch-based interface was gaining the popularity necessary for webpages to undergo a radical medium shift. Not something Jobs would've guessed a few years back...

While I find this of great interest, I really have no place in the technical debate between Flash and HTML5. It's just that the gradual snuffing out of Flash's relevance means that, as it's so often the case in the digital world, a chapter will end, transforming what was once a standard mode of communication into ephemera.

The days of Flash are far from gone but let's follow through on a thought experiment; what would change in a flashless web? While webpage design will live on through an adaptation to HTML5 protocols, a gradual and almost invisible movement that has already begun, and movie embedding will espouse the new native film script within the code, I believe that one peculiar bit of web paraphernalia, the flash game, will suffer most.

In the early days of web plug-ins, the small browser-based game was Macromedia's ambassador. I remember being redirected to Macromedia site for Shockwave support and being greeted with the promise of over a dozen free games playable within my Netscape browser. The link between Shockwave and Flash is confusing, but the Shockwave plug-in was so popular that Macromedia branded its Flash plug-in the "Shockwave Flash Player." Likewise, the Shockwave Site, created in 1999 by Adobe to showcase its products' potential proposed simplified games that became the staple of the Flash player. As far as I can see, the site now only offers Flash games. This enmeshed history has left a very obvious mark in the Flash file extension; .swf (or Shock Wave Flash).

At the time of Macromedia's reign I had the age where the kind of hyper-digression offered by free games was at the heart of the web experience, an age when extraneous links are actual discovery possibilities, rather than annoying distractions, I found myself coming back to Macromedia's site time and again, even when my plug-ins were up-to-date, hoping for new distractions to fill my adolescent time. At the time, these games were mostly adaptations of classic arcade games, with Asteroids and Snake being my time-wasters of choice. The strange conflagration of being proud of having an early web-adopter status (having programmed Shockwave code in a 1997 computer science course) combined with the throwback to the dawn of arcade games was synonym with the Flash game experience. Indeed, every year, new games reinvent the genre, but their adulation lies with ingenuity rather than technical advancement. A flash game is, by definition, a small, simple game. The most effective games of late, such as Canabalt or those developed by Nerdook espouse the simplicity of early arcade gems with the right twists to make them feel new again.

The flash game empire is now larger than ever. Places like Kongregate or Armor Games have elevated their enjoyment to the level of social media.  Yet, as MySpace has shown us, social mediums can be heavily crippled by technical revolutions. The genre has split up into several subgenres; tower defence, launch games, point-and-shoot, etc. It even has a division of self-conscious creations that act as a commentary on the notion of "game" in general. There have also been "art" games, often characterized by soft music, beautiful graphics and pop-philosophical twist endings. But phone apps, steam and console purchases have shown that there are other channels through which small games can prosper. Will we remember this as the golden age of flash games? Or will flash games in themselves be forgotten as a whole, a collective lapse born out of each individual game's disposable nature?

Spasms of creation

It seems difficult, nowadays, to speak sincerely of melancholia or death without being passed off as an angst-ridden teenager with eyeliner and a jet-black asymmetric hairdo. But, I'll try to approach it from an angle that just doesn't fit within the emo aesthetic.

I was just watching the first Patlabor movie, a classic 1989 mecha anime, directed and animated by the team behind Ghost in the Shell, when it struct me how unlikely it was that this movie would get its turn unfurling before my eyes. While I do enjoy japanese animation, I am far from an expert, and it might be considered one of my minor interests. As such, I might have made it through life without seeing Patlabor without feeling, other than in a passing party discussion with a true aficionado, loss from not having gotten around to it.  So it could have gone entirely unnoticed, as it likely does for many here on this earth.  While not particularly obscure (if I wanted obscure I would have brought up of Perostrínia 2004 or some other forgotten work, not a rich Japanese franchise comprising of three movies, a television series and many straight-to-whatever media of the time films) Patlabor showcases some meticulously drawn backgrounds of the best 80s anime, and a particularly breathtaking board became the locus for the aforementioned melancholia.  Thinking about the animator, working over the details of a house's roof in what would become a panning cityscape.

The moment spent applying honed skill to a detail within a fraction-of-a-second glimpse.  I thought of how little appreciation this detail was getting on a day-to-day basis and somehow all of human endeavour came to mind.  Working of a movie of this scope likely was a dream come true to the animators brought onboard.  Their efforts probably paid off in a sense of self-worth and in monetary compensation, as the movie was well-received and well-watched.  But that's not really the point.  What I'm getting at is that the movie's details have already entered a logic of posterity, where they are at best remembered, and only moving towards being forgotten.

I would like to think that its worth hasn't changed now that it's 22 years old.  Quite to the contrary, it offers some great moments of retro-futurism, like advanced robot-hardware running on 1989 software (with, as added charm, the bleep-bloop-bleeps reminiscent of integrated 80s PC sound).  But having left the relatively limited spotlight of the new release section, and of random Japanese small talk about current events, Patlabor already exists in a stasis state, archived rather than actualized when watched by the concerned few (otakus, moderate fans, cartoon network stoners, etc.). Unless one decides to grant this movie an amount of time that is uneven with the rest of possible creative works, it is merely glossed over as part of an ensemble.  I myself only watched it in an effort to see some of the most popular japanese feature-length animations.  I'll soon be moving on to other films, and it will gather dust on a shelf, besides thousands of others like it. My point being that even now, speaking of the film, I am not actualizing it as much as using it to speak of every film, of every piece of music, of all writing.  These spasms of creation that started waves not yet extinguished, but slowly being annulled by the resistance of history.

Patlabor, with its charming representation of the year 1999 as one of the near future, stands as a monument to time passing.  The melancholia felt by the short lived appreciation for effort is a symptom to this unveiling of the passage of time.  When discussing melacholia, Robert Burton found a remedy in song and dance;

"Chiron the centaur, is said to have cured this and many other diseases by music alone: as now they do those, saith Bodine, that are troubled with St. Vitus's Bedlam dance."

Oddly then, it might be that the very same feeling caused by old movies is what motivates those in the present to make their own spasms, their own creative works, in turn burying the past in the archive necessitated by the proliferation.   From one spasm to the next.

Mucking Documentaries

Warning, spoilers ahead.

I have been obsessed with Exit Through the Gift Shop.  While its initial draw came from Thierry Guetta's footage, priceless documents of the street art scene, it is the status of Banksy's montage that became the probing question refusing to let go.  When Mr. Brainwash makes its apparition, 57 minutes into the 1h26 long film, I was struck with perhaps my favourite feeling, that of entering a complex network of coincidences.  Looking up from my computer screen, I could see a poster, brought back from New York by my girlfriend depicting the Beatles in Kiss makeup.

In the bottom left corner, a signature, "Mr Brainwash."  This memento of an exhibit had been given to her on the spot.  Entering the warehouse where the exposition took place, she had taken a liking diametrically opposite to Banksy and Fairey's snide dismissal, perhaps due to the recognition of the referrals of Mr. Brainwash's artwork: Andy Warhol meets street art.

While derivative (what art isn't?) the experience of a Banksy show broadened to reach a larger audiences didn't strike her; after all, our individual experiences are rarely on par with an informed and contextual standpoint.   She got to ponder the worth of mass produced art, in a post-Warhol era, and was introduced to the vocabulary of street art in a more expansive way than, say, finding oneself in front of a commissioned Fairey mural while wandering Manhattan's downtown streets.

The question of authenticity, valued above all else in the art collector's world, is left up to wealthy auctioneers' decision, while the authenticity of her own enjoyment, and that of a truly pleasant moment spent with her father and sister, shouldn't have to come under scrutiny.  Sure A-listers and those lucky enough to be around when Banksy's Barely Legal was up might have the comparative sentiment of being fed rehashed ideas, but those wandering into Mr. Brainwash's "show" experience a diffused glow of its influences.

Both Exit Through the Gift Shop and another important documentary of 2010, Catfish, have come under scrutiny as possible "fakes."  Wikipedia tells us that both Morgan Spurlock and Zack Galifianakis expressed their belief that the events in Catfish were staged, as if the skepticism of the famous is somehow more important.  Instead of resolving anything with his expert status, Spurlock, having faced the same accusations, adds another layer of complexity to the discourse around the documentary's factuality.  General claims of mistrust in both documentaries' portrayed reality abound on the web, in comment boards and on blogs.  The doubt in the coincidences that make up the narrative structure of Catfish, doubt in the fact that a person living such a dramatic story is sharing a studio with two filmmakers for example, is easy enough to understand, but the the reasons for the incredulity in front of Banksy's films are more complex.  The film, in a certain way, is about pretensions of authenticity and the printing of facsimiles, joined by the visual proof that Banksy is a notorious prankster.  Some point to the pictures of The Laughing Cavalier behind Guetta during his last interviews, others to the similitudes between Guetta's work and Banksy's, predicting that Banksy is playing with the monetary worth of his own production by passing it off as another's (a ridiculed other).

In this era of wariness, scripted "reality" is a genre of its own and is central to music channels' (why them?) schedules.  Its also become a technical "genre" with sitcoms shedding the canned laughs and espousing the hand-held camera.  Survivor has been around so long that we can no longer call reality TV a new phenomenon.  Mockumentaries have been around for half a century, yet perhaps documentaries are now being swallowed up by meddlers mucking up the continuum between the "real" and fiction on film.  Years of critical theory has taught us that all representations have are, in a certain way, constructed fiction, through montage and perspective, but the "realness" of documentaries continues to act as a classifying criterion.

The documentary as an object in the world has wrought doubt about Mr. Brainwash's existence.  Its narrative casts doubt on his authenticity.  In a way, Mr. Brainwash is the perfect poster-boy for fiction's problematic relationship with the real.  He is a reminder that one can never be absolutely sure that he's in the know, that he's at the heart of the joke, at the head of the pyramid scheme of mockery.  Or that Descartes' deceiving God lurks in the apprehension of the everyday.  Some spectators, watching the documentary for the first time and knowing little about its background story, will question the veracity of the portrayed facts, making initial experiences with Exit Through the Gift Shop as ambiguous as those conjured by Mr. Brainwash's exhibits.

In recent news, Thierry Guetta has been sued by Glen E. Friedman for infringing on his copyrighted pictures of Run DMC.  In a way, its a perfect ending to the questions of his existence.  Forced by the law to appear in court, Guetta will have to prove the authenticity of his fair use.  Will this formal convocation fixate his status or just add more to the story?

I, for one, welcome these dubious overtones.

Or do I?

Reflective overflow

Hello.



Testing testing, is this thing on? One, two, *feedback sine-wave screech*.

Here is one of the few remaining movies of Emile Cohl, Don Hertzfeldt of the Fin du siècle, pioneer in animation and member of the proto-dada avant-guarde movement Les incohérents.  Which films are going to be the fabled lost documents of our times in a hundred years?  In two hundred years?

The larger the temporal distance we use to project a future's opinion about the present, the more the period encompassed in the "present" is extended.  For instance, say a time-traveller visits this moment from the year 3692, he might mention to his darling, while calling home through his chronophone, that he is at the beginning of the 21st century.  Another traveller, from the year 369258, would find the unit of "century" too specific, like mentioning the exact second at which a rendez-vous should take place.  He might opt, in a casual discussion, to simply call our time "the second millennium."  Finally, a traveler from the year 2086, might actually specify the month at which he made his landing.  This is important because it makes us realize that our moment in time is part of an infinite amount of ever-increasing ensembles, and that as the years go by, minutes are swallowed into hours, hours into days, days into weeks, and so on.  We settle for general information about, say, the date of composition of Shakespeare's plays, because time has blurred the instant when he dotted the final period at the end of King Lear.  Necessary constraints like lack of archive space, economy of attention and absence of records create the limits of what we call moments.

The obsession with knowledge hoarding that is a necessary symptom of the age of information cannot reverse this movement as would a time-machine.  Instead, we hold dearly to the present's information, store it in databases and on hard-drives.  Yet time marches on.  Emile Cohl's lost work is about a century old, which is relatively less than, say, the works lost to the burning down of Alexandria's library.  His highly flammable reels failed to survive two world wars, and the conversions into many more obsolete mediums.  But are the challenges faced by today's cultural works lessened by the advent of the digital?

This blog will attempt to grasp ephemeria about the way knowledge comports itself in the new media economy.  It is a way to exorcise the pop-envy found in my academic writing. A commentary for the Wikipedia generation. It doesn't hope to survive the passage of time.